Engineer was walking through the basement, an unusual occurrence. Sure, everybody on the RED side of 2fort knew about the basement, knew how to get to it (through a door in the resupply next to the intel room), and knew what was in it (mostly assorted storage), but its prevailing weather conditions-damp, cold, and various combinations thereof-dissuaded most REDs from superfluous trips down there. Engineer was only there because he needed some more pencils for working on his blueprints; all of the others he had were down to mere stubs.
However, Engineer was lost, and he had yet to find the correct storage room. Noting one on his right that he hadn't checked yet, he brushed the thick layer of dust off of the doorknob and tried it. The door opened not into yet another storage room as Engineer had expected, but rather into a long, dimly-lit staircase.
His interest piqued, Engineer started walking down the stairs before he remembered that he was supposed to be getting some pencils. He could always investigate tomorrow or the day after.
The next day was Saturday, and as such, there was no fighting (well, official, cross-team fighting) for the day. The REDs and the BLUs stayed on their own side of 2fort; for the most part, everyone entertained themself.
Engineer normally spent the day making minute adjustments to his buildings to make them even more efficient and accurate (not that his teammates would notice, but he liked to do things as best he could); however, today he was going to explore that staircase he had found yesterday.
It took him a while to find the correct door, but once he had, he set out at once for wherever it led. He hadn't told any of his teammates about his discovery; it wasn't that big of a deal, and exploring with someone didn't appeal much to him-he worked better alone.
The stairway was a long one. Engineer had lost sight of the entrance before he came to the door-or, rather, he nearly walked into it. The doorknob was sticky and for a moment Engineer was sure it was locked but after a few moments he realized that it was not.
Engineer stepped out into a completely dark hallway, but as soon as he took a step forward, lights turned on, revealing corridors stretching off into the distance.
This interesting phenomenon of a subbasement almost made Engineer forget that the lights had turned on by themselves. They had to have been operated by somebody...
However, as he peered down the corridor, Engineer noticed a familiar component mounted on the wall, a sentry's motion cam, pointed at the door. It must have been connected to the lights.
Just from a cursory inspection, it appeared that the subbasement was as large as or larger than the basement, and Engineer didn't particularly want to get lost. If he were to use a string to find his way back, and if he mapped it as he went...
Engineer's third visit to the subbasement door, the next day (he had been held up by Spy accidentally-on-purpose breaking one of his work tables, and it took the rest of the day to fix), took less time than the first two. It seemed as though he was actually learning the layout of the basement, somewhat.
After carefully tying the string off on the doorknob, Engineer set off to explore this new realm. The corridors snaked all over the place in rather illogical ways, and though he thought it was arranged in a vaguely grid-like pattern, he wound up back-tracking more than once.
Half an hour into his exploration, Engineer was poking into any rooms he came across when he found another flight of stairs.
He carefully tied the string off on the doorknob and followed it back to the entrance. He wanted to have another string for this second floor; he was not going to get lost like some inexperienced fool!
Engineer came back quickly with a whole ball of twine this time and a pair of scissors. The string he had tied certainly helped him get back to the staircase.
To Engineer's dismay, the second floor, while structurally similar to the first, was completely different in terms of layout.
He sighed. If he was going to map this place, he'd best start by exploring.
Over the course of the next two weeks, Engineer spent a small amount of his free time simply exploring. He'd discovered a third floor to the subbasement, and had sketched rough maps of all three floors, but what interested him most were the rooms.
A lot of them were empty, but when Engineer found a dusty old crate of food or what have you, he always felt a little pleased.
On one end of the second floor, Engineer had found quite a few rooms filled with computers, which he had deduced to be the computers that controlled his buildings. He'd always known that most of their computing power had come from somewhere else, but he'd never guessed it was from something like this! He felt like he could just sit and watch the giant computers for hours; as he was trying to explore, he limited it to merely a few dozen minutes.
Engineer tried to make his surreptitious visits as unnoticeable as possible. He still hadn't told any other RED about the subbasement; if somebody wandered in and wasn't careful, they would no doubt get lost, and Engineer kind of liked having his own little world to explore. It wouldn't be half as wonderful if the whole base could just barge right in.